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A ledge of rock had, by the assistance of the chisel and pick-axe, been formed into a sort of quay. The rock was of extremely hard consistence, and the task so difficult, that, according to the fisherman, a labourer who wrought at the work might in the evening have carried home in his bonnet all the shivers which he had struck from the mass in the course of the day.
This cottage was as remote from Dymock's Tower in one way, as Shanty's shed was in another; although the three dwellings formed together a sort of equilateral triangle. Mr. Dymock long suspected that this labourer had done his share to waste his substance; and once or twice it had occurred to him, that if he left the Castle he might retire to the cottage.
It always seems to me a strange thing that men should insist that you must first transport your labourer thousands of miles to a desolate, bleak country in order to set him to work to extract a livelihood from the soil when hundreds of thousands of acres lie only half tilled at home or not tilled at all.
But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal.
For the richest sheikh will don tattered clothes when he visits the surgery, and would doubtless be taken for some poor labourer were it not for Achmet, who sees through the disguise and gives a discreet sign to AEsculapius, whose services, of course, must be prepaid; it is money down before he will prescribe or give away a drop of medicine.
But the sexton, a dogged, bovine, bullet-headed labourer, took no notice whatever of this injunction, and although Mr Kenrick went into the reading-desk, continued lustily to ring the bell until the whole Hugginson family, furious that their dignity should thus be insulted, sailed into church at the beginning of the psalms.
At midnight he woke the labourer, and told him to have the horse ready at five o'clock in the morning for him to drive to the station; he undressed and got into bed, but could not get to sleep. He heard how his father, still awake, paced slowly from window to window, sighing, till early morning. No one was asleep; they spoke rarely, and only in whispers.
The appearance of Brett, of the waiting groom, and of a chance labourer who now strode up the village street, led her to think so. She did not realise that the whole affair had barely lasted a minute, that Brett was Hume's friend, the man-servant a stranger who had seen nothing and heard little, whilst the villager only wondered, when he touched his cap, "why Miss Layton was so flustered like."
But let any one traverse the provinces of France, get acquainted with the people, make inquiries around him and penetrate into their habits and customs, and he will find that the predominant feeling is love of the spot on which they are born; the farmer will keep on the farm his ancestors tilled before him for ages, and if offered a better farm, if it be far removed from his home and that of his fathers he will reject it; with the same tenacity the labourer clings to his cottage and the little bit of land he has always delved.
Thus undermined, the peasant outlook gave way, perforce, to that of the modern labourer, and the old attachment to the countryside was weakened. In all this change of attitude, however, we see only one of those indirect results of the enclosure of the common which were spoken of above.
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